Interview with Eric King Interview Subject: Eric King Interviewer: David S. Rotenstein Interview Date: October 24, 1990 Interview Location: Blind Willie’s 828 N Highland Ave NE Atlanta, GA 30306 Transcribed: December 2012 Eric King (KING) Interviewed by David Rotenstein (ROTENSTEIN) Blind Willie’s Atlanta, Ga. October 24, 1990 [The interview took place at the bar. Equipment used: Sanyo microcassette recorder, internal microphones. Recording began after King and I began speaking. The interview was conducted to collect background information on Blind Willie’s and the Atlanta blues scene. At the time, I (David Rotenstein) was working as a freelance writer for an Atlanta weekly entertainment newspaper called Footnotes. I and writer/musician Bryan Powell alternated writing the paper’s weekly blues column. Other speakers include Roger Gregory (GREGORY) and Joel Murphy (MURPHY).] KING: Anyway, we put together a pack with a lot of the old press clips and stuff. When we first opened, it was almost five years ago, Blues Harbor had been open about six months and it kind of stung the blues community here – what there was of us – because we thought here’s a guy – none of us knew McDaris, Jim McDaris, who opened Blues Harbor. And we’d all talked about it for years and this guy, he goes out and he does it. No [unintelligible], he just went out and did it and it came in with a full concept, which you had to respect. Maybe it’s a little too prepackaged, but it’s a good idea, you know. And economically, it makes a lot of sense. So we’re kind of licking our wounds and we had had Blind Willie’s on the drawing board back then. This was in – we were talking about it in eighty-five, around January of eighty-five. We started construction that fall and had it open the next February, February of eighty-six. ROTENSTEIN: What was in here before you opened? [1:22] KING: It was an electric store. But the building was so charming because this wall was all covered with mortar and Chicago Bob chipped it all off with an air hammer. I mean the bluesmen built the place. Joel Murphy, the guitar player in the Shadows nailed up all this stuff. Michael Catalano, who plays here early in the evenings in Friday and Saturday, he stained and varnished this. I laid-up a lot of the drywall and designed everything else in here. And it was kind of unique in that we figured we wanted to have a place where the local blues guys came first because we just didn’t feel particularly welcome at many 1 of the clubs aimed at younger crowds. And the blues, we didn’t think, appealed that much to the twenty-one to twenty-five group. But later on it seems like they realized that blues wasn’t some – or at least their concept of the blues – maybe wasn’t nearly as much fun as our concept of the blues. Beth went to Emory. I mean she’s been sucked into the blues vortex over the years. She used to come see the Aztecs, that was the Shadows before that. And she was a rock and roller who got sucked into the blues. ROTENSTEIN: Give me a little background about yourself? KING: Well, Bo Emerson did a story, when was that, in April, which pretty much covered where I’m from. I’m trying to figure out some things that he didn’t – My background, of course, is just some suburban kid from Ohio, from Cleveland, but we had a real eclectic collection of records around the house. Everything from big band to Harry Belafonte to folk music. And Cleveland at the time, back in the late fifties, early sixties, when I was living there, had some good AM blues stations. Transistor radios changed my life. Man, I was always listening and if I couldn’t get rock and roll, I’d listen to whatever else I found. And late at night, I heard, you know, Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters and this was some real raw stuff. It must have been, you know, a weird DJ who just liked playing some of the originals. I was, “Damn, what is this?” But it was the real thing. I got lucky. There was a small folk club in Cleveland that was a stopping-off point for people going east-west, west-east and they were right on the cutting edge. They did everyone from the Gordon Lightfoots and the [unintelligible; 4:20], Judy Collins and those kind of acts where you could see them in a room a little bigger than Willie’s but not much. But they also brought in some great blues and that’s the first time I saw Cotton, was about in nineteen sixty-eight, sixty-seven, something like that. And he had a little four-piece band and they couldn’t even get a drink of liquor in the place so we had to go across the street and get him a bottle at the liquor store across the street so they had something to nip. This was strictly a beer and coffeehouse kind of place. So I got lucky in Cleveland and got a chance to see some vintage blues even then. And then I moved, I went to college in New York and, you know, I lived right in the Village so I saw everyone from the coffeehouse-style blues acts, the Sonny Terrys, the Brownie McGhees to Albert King at the Fillmore East, you know. It was a nice era to be in the Village. ROTENSTEIN: Where did you go to school? [5:18] 2 KING: NYU. ROTENSTEIN: What did you study there? KING: Business, actually. But the key thing for me was I was on the newspaper staff and my heart wasn’t in accounting or marketing or anything but I did love the newspaper stuff because I got passes to everything. I had a season pass to the Fillmore East. I mean everyone from Ten Years After and Albert King to Santana and I thought, “Man, this is my kind of –“ [unintelligible] with newspaper work. In fact, Leonard Maltin, the movie critic, worked for me on the paper. A terrible writer but the nicest guy in the world. I mean he loved Hollywood films. It didn’t make any difference [unintelligible] they were. But Lenny was always a really nice guy. In New York you got a chance to run into great people. You know, you had interview opportunities with – Ten Years After, you want to talk to Albert, Lee, or Lorin Hollander, the concert pianist. Clive Barnes was one of my teachers there, the theater critic and New York just was overwhelming. Wonderful city for someone interested in the arts. And of course it was a political time and I ended up doing a lot of antiwar protesting and joined VISTA and got sent to St. Louis. My VISTA project there was working designing plans for a street academy for the community. And that, you know, after a couple of years the school board instituted that so I was looking for someplace to go and I met some friends who are still here in Atlanta. They were VISTAs in St. Louis with me and they said come on down and visit. I fell in love with this city. ROTENSTEIN: What was it, what part of the city? KING: I live in Candler Park now and when I came down it was the same neighborhood I was living with friends in, this little part of town. ROTENSTEIN: What really hooked you into Atlanta, though? [7:27] KING: If you’ve ever been to St. Louis, it is the epitome of urban removal. They take down an apartment building and they pave a solid city block. More paving contracts must be let in that city than anyplace else in North America. And they’ll put a phone booth right on the corner. That is the total public services they provide. You can call, you know, that’s it. And it was a harsh town, real racist at the time and I was – being a hippie at the time, I was getting a lot of flak for dealing with the political, a progressive political element. 3 ROTENSTEIN: Were you involved with the blues scene in St. Louis? KING: The music scene was – there was, located in a couple of areas in St. Louis, still, guys like Tommy Bankhead and the El Dorados, whose got a new album out. Let’s see who were some of the other cats. Chuck Berry had a farm near St. Louis, which was pretty notorious, even back then, for wild parties. Who were some of the others. Oliver Sain was still around St. Louis. But it was not a lucrative scene and these are cutting cheap clubs. I didn’t hang out there too much with them. The St. Louis – this was a poor, poor city. And also, this was – disco came in strong then. Disco knocked the hell out of live music in a lot of the black community, especially in St. Louis. Everybody can be a star at disco. Why pay five bucks to watch a band? ROTENSTEIN: So what year did you come to Atlanta? [9:21] KING: Seventy-three. And started working with kids in an adolescent treatment center. And I still do – I have a day gig, I work with teenagers. It keeps me young. It keeps me tuned in with teenagers [unintelligible].